Social Media Marketing: How to Create an Effective Campaign

Social media used to be just for connecting with family and friends. Now, though, 92% of marketers say that social media marketing is an essential part of their marketing plan.

Don’t get left behind. Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about how to create an effective social media campaign.

Pre-Planning

Before you fire up that new post, make sure you’ve thought it through.

Consider Your Target Audience

This is the first step to creating a powerful social media campaign. If you don’t know who you’re trying to reach, you simply won’t reach the right people. Defining your target audience ahead of time will allow you to create quality and relevant content for your customer base.

If your target audience is diverse, you’ll know you need to make your content universally appealing. If you find that your target audience is actually relatively narrow, you’ll need to hone in to make your content more specific.

Find Your Big Idea

Advertising guru David Ogilvy said that you need a big idea to sell a product. While we’re not talking about advertising here, and some say that this idea is dead, it can certainly be translated to social media campaigns.

How many uninspired posts do you see a day that aren’t interesting, engaging, or insightful? Probably too many.

It’s easy to get into a “quantity over quality” mindset in the dash to line up regularly scheduled content for your social media campaign. Check yourself every now and then. Make sure your posts are holding up to quality standards.

Your “big idea” doesn’t need to be gimmicky, and it doesn’t even need to be all that big. It just needs to point toward your landing page, inform your brand, and engage with your customer base.

Use All Your Tools

Programs like Buffer Publish allow you to schedule posts for multiple social media accounts at a time. You should be planning every detail of your posts, from the time of day posted to hashtags used to writing smart and engaging copy.

Programs like SumAll provide analytics about how your social media pages are doing. This is invaluable information. It shows whether your tactics are working or not, and isn’t that the whole point?

Setting up Your Social Media Campaign

Follow these steps to design your social media campaign from start to finish.

Determine Your Goal

The whole point of a social media campaign isn’t to get new followers, increase engagement, and improve your metrics. These are important stepping stones to what your actual goal is. Don’t lose sight of that as you start to gain new followers.

What is your goal? To solve a problem that your customer base has? To provide a service?

Once you pinpoint your company’s underlying, ideological goal, connect it to your concrete goal. Think: more clickthroughs to your website, engagement with a blog post, signing up for an email list.

The goal for your social media campaign should be to bring those two together. When your customer base sees that you’ve got their needs in mind, they’ll proceed to take concrete action to give you their business.

Define Your Brand

After you’ve hammered out the details of the needs of your target audience, you can begin to design your brand around those details.

Color schemes, your voice in copy, and design aesthetics all need to be considered when defining your brand. Make sure these walk the line between feeling true to you and appealing to your target audience.

This isn’t always easy. Hiring a branding service can be an immense help in determining, designing, and executing informed branding decisions.

Pick Your Platforms

People engage with each social media platform differently. Instagram lends itself to static images and videos. Pinterest is best for blog clickthroughs. Facebook is all about video content nowadays.

Your copy should be different according to each platform, and your visuals might even differ, too. Knowing your platforms and playing to their strengths will help your campaign be the best it can be across the board.

You should also make sure you’re using every platform that your target audience uses. If you don’t, you’re missing out on valuable organic marketing opportunities. And if you focus too much on a platform that your target audience isn’t using, you’re wasting your time.

Determine Your Schedule

Instagram’s new algorithm doesn’t show all content chronologically anymore. This means you’re already in competition with those who are posting more frequently than you. You should be posting at least once a day to stay relevant to Instagram’s algorithm and drive more organic traffic.

Write Your Copy

Itching to finally write your post after putting so much thought into it beforehand? Make sure you’re maintaining a consistent tone and appealing to your target audience through a mechanism like humour or transparency. This is your opportunity for creativity.

Consider these few details when writing your post:

Hashtag use. Are you utilizing them appropriately? Are you using popular hashtags that will drive organic traffic?

Matching your image. Customers can tell when your copy or image is cookie cutter, and they don’t match up. Be sure to reference the image in the copy at least once to keep things feeling natural.

URL. If you’re including a URL to your website or blog, make sure to incorporate it as seamlessly as possible. You don’t want to appear spammy.

How Is Your Social Media Campaign Looking?

Now that you’ve got all the tools to devise a killer social media campaign, get to work on crafting content for your customer base!

If it seems like too much to DIY, get in touch! We would love to help you grow your business!